The Altaic forms with word-initial sibilant in place of expected *t- are surely caused by pre-Altaic palatalization before high front vowels as has also apparently occurred in its second person pronominal forms.

Darya Kavitskaya in Compensatory Lengthening: Phonetics, Phonology, Diachrony (2002) relates her own story about perceptual metathesis on page 48 in footnote 8: "Indeed, in teaching Russian to American students, I noticed many instances of palatalization of the consonant being heard as some kind of diphthongal property of the preceding vowel, for example, [banʲa] 'bath' was misheard and pronounced as [baʲnʲa] or even [bajna]." (link here).